Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association (and an ambassador of the Real Food Festival), writes frankly about the need for resilience and how we need to act together and quickly if we are to meet the challenges ahead.

"All over the world people are now asking questions about what caused the collapse of the world’s financial systems, why more people didn’t see it coming. From my perspective the underlying cause was that for the last couple of decades our financial institutions have been in the business of treating capital as if it was income. The accumulated capital was derived partly from inflated property values.

In exactly the same way but for a considerably longer period we have been doing the same with our food and farming systems. The capital that we have used up consists of soil fertility, fossil fuels, mineral fertilizers and the skills capital of the human workforce.

The financial downturn is hurting – there is no doubt about that - but the pain we are feeling will be nothing in comparison with what would feel if there was a collapse of our food systems . After all everyone can do without money, or at least can manage on less of it, but no one can do without regular and secure supplies of food.

The precariousness of our current food systems has become apparent to me over the last two or three years since meeting a man called Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement. His message - that the depletion of environmental capital in the form of fossil fuels is now reaching a critical turning point - shocked me into conducting an audit of the vulnerability of my own farm to sudden interruptions of the key things that I depend upon, diesel, electricity, straw, grain, cattle feed and seeds.

I imagined sudden interruptions of all these inputs the availability of which I take totally for granted. I then looked at how long the farm would continue to function without them. Just to put you in the picture we have 65 diary cows, plus another 40 young stock, producing milk and more recently cheese and two or three fields of oats and carrots. We’ve been organic for 35 years so I thought we were part of the solution but unfortunately my farm like almost everyone in early 21 century Britain has come to take for granted the availability of long distant supplies of things I can’t do without, at least not for very long.

The word resilience might have been somewhat overused over recent months but I think it is a pretty good term to describe the ability of a system to carry on functioning even after experiencing external shocks. For obviously our food systems need to be as resilient as possible to sudden interruptions of energy, transport, seeds and other inputs and along with just about every other farm in Britain mine isn’t. I worked out that we could only keep going for 12 hours – i.e. from one milking to the next - if my supplies of diesel and electricity were shut down and I have no plan B for doing without them. However even after becoming aware of this issue I’ve found it very difficult to put into place the changes which will enable my farm to develop this resilience because the changes that are needed require not only very expensive investment in new machinery but also radical changes of attitude amongst the consumers who buy the food that I produce.

It’s all very well having grandiose plans about windmills, methane digesters, solar panels etc or switching away from supplying supermarkets through centralised processing and distribution hubs (that’s the current system) to selling all the carrots and cheese I produce through the local farmer’s markets in Lampeter and Tregowan but if I was to make such radical changes over night I would definitely go out of business. I haven’t got the money to buy the kit, some of the technology doesn’t yet exist, the alternative transport system hasn’t yet been developed and critically the public in West Wales are not particularly committed to buying local food - they would rather go down to the supermarket and buy something.

That is a very brief overview of an intellectual and emotional journey that I’ve been on over the last two years. I am now absolutely clear that we have a problem with our food systems and that business as usual shouldn’t be an option, but I am equally clear that the kind of changes that we need to put into place will require an enormous collective effort at all levels; individual, community and government, on a scale akin to a war effort. The scary thing is that we probably only have 10 to 15 years to prepare, to ensure that our food systems are sufficiently resilient and sustainable to provide reliable supplies of food for the next generation. Because of this I believe the Soil Association has an enormous responsibility, not to deliver all these changes on its own - one small membership charity couldn’t possibility do that - but to do everything we possibly can to alert the public to the precariousness of our current food systems, the urgency of the need for change and the need to come together at all levels to address this critical issue."

Patrick Holden CBE has been Director of the Soil Association since 2003 and is an ambassador for the Real Food Festival.